Potty-mouthed L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti channels his inner Miley Cyrus

This screen grab from a YouTube video shows Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti holding up what appears to be a bottle of beer during the June 16, 2014 rally for the Los Angeles Kings, after the team won its second Stanley Cup in three seasons. The mayor also dropped an F-bomb during his speech after saying a politician should never be photographed with alcohol or swear.

Of course the sticks-in-the-mud I work for at the paper won’t let me use the actual f-word, but I’m pretty sure you know which one it is.

The origin of the f-bomb has occupied linguists with time on their hands — which is pretty much all of them — for decades. It’s believed to have Germanic roots, first appearing in print about 500 years ago, which came as a shock to me, since I assumed the first f-bomb was uttered in 1961, the day they cut the ribbon on the I-405.

The good news is the world has survived half a millennium of potty mouths hurling the f-word without spinning off its axis, and I’m pretty sure the sun will continue to rise in the east despite our mayor’s orchestrated and rehearsed “spontaneous” slip of the tongue.

Wrapped in a spanking new Kings’ jersey, Mayor Garcetti was greeted by a chorus of boos when introduced to the crowd at Staples, a tradition in American sports. But our mayor is smarter than your average mayor, even if thus far he’s only been an average mayor.

With Bud Light bottle in hand — no frilly craft beer for this man of the people — Garcetti turned the jeers into cheers by announcing he would break the politician’s golden rules, “Never, ever be pictured with a drink in your hand and never swear,” said the mayor before hoisting his bottle skyward and letting the f-bomb fly!

“But this is a big f***ing day!”

A sanitized version of Garcetti’s “slip” was quickly tweeted out from the mayor’s official Twitter account, and later that night the regular guy offensive was capped off when mayor f-bomb took a bow on Kimmel, explaining how he, “got a little ahead of himself.”

Actually, Garcetti got exactly what he was hoping for.

After nearly a year in office, Garcetti’s low key demeanor makes former L.A. Mayor Jim Hahn look like Toronto’s crack-head Mayor Rob Ford. Garcetti’s spontaneous f-bomb was about as spontaneous as a Hollywood red carpet wardrobe malfunction. This was a deliberate rebranding, a political version of Miley Cyrus washing the Disney off her career.

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Also appearing on Kimmel was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio who murdered Randy Newman’s sarcastic anthem, “I Love L.A.” accompanied by kids from the “52nd Street Project.” Child Protective Services has been notified.

De Blasio was paying off his Stanley Cup wager with Garcetti who had pledged to sing “New York, New York” if the Rangers had beaten the Kings. Garcetti actually has a very nice singing voice but would hardly have gotten the same media buzz with his Spring Street Sinatra act that he grabbed by dropping the f-bomb.

While the pandering, cynical and condescending use of a common obscenity on live television in front of a crowd that included thousands of kids may say a lot about Eric Garcetti, it says just as much about the rest of us.

Facebook and Twitter exploded with glee at the mayor’s expletive, with many posting “He’s got my vote!” or variations thereof, a sentiment shared by millions who had never heard of Eric Garcetti prior to Monday’s celebration.

As the great oracle of modern American sensibilities, Charlie Sheen, would say, “Winning!”

The losers are the well-behaved.

On Monday, parents who still try to teach their kids decorum and self-control lost when Mayor Garcetti was high-fived for using a word that would get them bounced from a city council meeting if they used it during a two-minute public comments forum.

“Virtue is its own reward” and that’s a good thing because in modern American culture, we’re bored by civility in our media-saturated world. Boredom is the ultimate obscenity.

Doug McIntyre’s column appears Sunday and Wednesday. He can be reached at: Doug@KABC.com